To Live
In China, Fugui and Jiazhen navigate tumultuous events as their status transitions from affluent landowners to common peasants.
family
Thirteen Princess Trees
The film follows several disaffected youth in the fictional Thirteen Princess High School in Chengdu. Feng, the film’s protagonist, is a short-haired tomboy who has a love affair with the jock, Taotao. With the arrival of Bao, a student from Beijing, Feng finds herself gravitating to the new presence.
The Go Master
The Go Master is a 2006 biopic by director Tian Zhuangzhuang of renowned twentieth century Go master Wu Qingyuan, better known by his adopted name of Go Seigen. The film, which premiered at the 44th New York Film Festival, focuses on the life of this extraordinary player from his meteoric rise as a child prodigy to fame and fortune as a revolutionary strategic thinker, as well as the tumultuous global conflicts between his homeland and … Read more
Summer Palace
Country girl Yu Hong leaves her village, her family and her lover to study in Beijing. At university, she discovers an intense world of sexual freedom and forbidden pleasure. Enraptured, compulsive, she falls madly in love with fellow student Zhou Wei. Driven by obsessive passions they can neither understand nor control, their relationship becomes one of dangerous games – betrayals, recriminations, provocations – as all around them, their fellow students begin to demonstrate, demanding democracy … Read more
I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone
Forest fires burn in Sumatra; a smoke covers Kuala Lumpur. Grifters beat an immigrant day laborer and leave him on the streets. Rawang, a young man, finds him, carries him home, cares for him, and sleeps next to him. In a loft above lives a waitress. She sometimes provides care and attention. More violence seems a constant possibility. They find another man abandoned on the street, paralyzed. They carry him. While no one speaks to … Read more
The Banquet
Empress Wan can launch a thousand ships with her charm and fight a hundred soldiers with her sword. But something is lacking in her life and she harbours forbidden desires for her stepson Prince Wu Luan , an introverted young man, who shies away from the palace to indulge in the ancient art of music and dance. When the Emperor dies all of a sudden and his younger brother Li takes over the throne, Wan … Read more
Fearless
Huo Yuan Jia became the most famous martial arts fighter in all of China at the turn of the 20th Century. Huo faced personal tragedy but ultimately fought his way out of darkness, defining the true spirit of martial arts and also inspiring his nation. The son of a great fighter who didn’t wish for his child to follow in his footsteps, Huo resolves to teach himself how to fight – and win.
Curse of the Golden Flower
During China’s Tang dynasty the emperor has taken the princess of a neighboring province as wife. She has borne him two sons and raised his eldest. Now his control over his dominion is complete, including the royal family itself.
The Emperor and His Brother
A young boy betrays his family who hides a refugee and tells the pursuer (Lo Lieh) where the hiding-place is – just because he wants a valuable telescope for reward. His father decides to kill the boy in order to restore the honor of the family.
Red Sorghum
An old leper who owned a remote sorghum winery dies. Jiu’er, the wife bought by the leper, and her lover, identified only as “my Grandpa” by the narrator, take over the winery and set up an idealized quasi-matriarchal community headed by Jiu’er. When the Japanese invaders subject the area to their rule and cut down the sorghum to make way for a road, the community rises up and resists as the sorghum grows anew.
Woman Demon Human
The fictional life and career of a famous actress in Chinese opera, a woman who goes against tradition by specializing in playing male roles, especially that of Zhang Kui, a benevolent ghost who appears in several Chinese operas. Although the actress’s career brings wealth and fame, it is attained only through considerable struggle against an anti-female system and an unhappy personal life.
The Horse Thief
Devout Buddhists, Norbu and Dolma live with their young son Tashi in a clan in Tibet. Norbu is a highwayman. After Norbu is charged with stealing from the temple, he and his family are banished. Impoverished and marginalized, they can do little when their beloved son becomes ill. Tashi dies of a fever. After a second son is born, Norbu focuses his every action on keeping this child alive, seeking re-admission to the clan for … Read more
A Great Wall
When computer programmer, Leo Fang, is passed up for promotion, he feels it is because he is Chinese, and quits. He takes his Chinese-American family to Mainland China to visit his relatives, the Chao’s for a vacation. The clash of cultures, between the men, wives, and teenagers, leads to some confusion, and misunderstanding.
Raise the Red Lantern
China in the 1920’s. After her father’s death, 19 year old Songlian is forced to marry the much older lord of a powerful family. With three wives already, each living in a separate house within the great castle, there is fierce competition for his attention and the privileges that are gained. This competition gets out of hand…
Black Snow
Winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin in 1990, Xie Fei’s film is a politically daring tale of urban alienation and despair. A former prisoner, played by the great Chinese actor Jiang Wen, arrives back in his native Beijing to find that he has no family or prospects or friends, just his underworld contacts trying to drag him back into a life of crime… Taking the classic crime thriller ‘hook’ – ex-con struggling to go … Read more
Two Great Sheep
The film follows a peasant couple, Zhao Deshan and his wife Xiuzhi, living in rural Yunnan province near Zhaotong in southern China. Their lives are thrown into upheaval when the local mayor “rewards” them with two foreign sheep donated by a former villager, now an official in Beijing. The couple is then tasked with breeding the sheep for their wool and to bring prosperity to their small community. Much to their chagrin, the sheep do … Read more
Love Battlefield
The story of a couple (Niki Chow and Eason Chan) who break up one morning and proceed to find their love tested in unexpected and violent ways.
The Story of Ermei
A portrait of contemporary China seen through the dreams and choices of a young peasant who has accepted her fate.
Jasmine Women
Zhang Ziyi plays the youngest of three generations of women who leads lives in Shanghai. Joan Chen plays the great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother. The film recounts this family, the mistakes they make, and a cycle that the granddaughter breaks out of.
The Green Dragon Inn
When an evil land baron’s son murders an innocent family, a Marshall is called in to escort him to be executed in the court of law far to the north. With the aid of an army of soldiers, the Marshall must fight off the Land Baron’s assassins, who want to try and free his murderous son at every given chance.
The Marriage Certificate
The wife of a prominent psychiatrist can’t find her marriage certificate one day. This “jiehunzheng” is all important. Without it, the family officially has never existed, including the daughter. The couple go on a wild goose chase through the Chinese bureaucracy, meeting catch-22 all the way….they need a certificate to get a new one, etc. They even journey back to the People’s Commune where they met, now the site of modern private enterprises where nobody … Read more
Quitting
An actor becomes increasingly introverted and psychotic and his entire family attempts to intervene. Jia, an actor and former drug addict, battled his addiction to marijuana and heroin for five years from 1992 to 1997.
Beijing Bicycle
A seventeen-year-old country boy working in Beijing as a courier has his bicycle stolen, and finds it with a schoolboy his age.
Chen Mo and Meiting
Chen Mo, a young man fresh from the countryside who’s scrambling to make a living selling flowers on the streets of Beijing, meets Mei Ting, a masseuse-hairdresser who, having repulsed the aggressive advances of her boss, has no place to live.
The Touch
A sister and brother, the last heirs of a family of acrobats, are called upon by a Buddhist monk sect to retrieve an artifact that their ancestors have protected throughout the ages.
Cry Woman
Desperate to support her family and earn enough money to get her husband out of jail, a woman with an unusual crying style becomes a professional mourner.
Sons
Story of a real family in Beijing. The father’s drinking problem starts it all. The mother struggles to keep the family together till she cannot take it any more.
Oh! What a Family – Qiao zhe yi jiazi
Oh! What a Family (1979) — — – 1 January 1979 Your rating: Not rated yet! Director: Haowei Wang Stars: Peisi Chen, Qiang Chen, Liu Xiaoqing, … Read more
A Revolutionary Family
Directed by Choui Khoua.